


Waiting

by grilledcheesing



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, Infinity War, Infinity War spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-02
Updated: 2018-05-20
Packaged: 2019-05-01 01:21:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14509389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grilledcheesing/pseuds/grilledcheesing
Summary: *** INFINITY WAR SPOILERS! ***Everyone comes back.Everyone, that is, except Peter.





	1. Chapter 1

Tony spends entirely too much of his life doing the thing he is worst at: waiting. Never in his life has it been as unbearable as this.

 

Strange is among the first to materialize, or maybe just the first to find Tony. One moment Tony is gasping, on his knees and thoroughly spent, and the next he is blinking into the eyes of a man brought back to life.

 

“Thank you for trusting me.”

 

The relief hasn’t hit him yet. Nothing has. Tony drops the gauntlet and it hits the ground with a _thud._

 

And then people are materializing all around him. Teammates. Strangers. The abandoned city is suddenly teeming with human life.

 

The only words Tony manages to utter at the end of all this, at the end of two straight months of chaos and pain and running on a steady diet of adrenaline and fear, are these: “I don’t see the kid.”

 

Strange doesn’t insult him by pretending not to know what he means. In fact, he doesn’t do anything at all; merely puts a hand on Tony’s shoulder and rests it there.

 

“Where is he?” Tony asks.

 

“Stark …”

 

No.

 

He did this for humanity, yes. But he he _did this_ for Peter. He did this because the echoes of _I don’t want to go_ are still rattling between his ears even now, as fresh as they were when they were first uttered. He did this because he was too careful and cared too goddamn _much_ to let something happen to that kid. He did this because he failed.

 

A moment ago he was so spent from raising the gauntlet he thought he may die. Now his body is a livewire, crackling with rage.

 

“Where _is_ he?”

 

“It may be awhile. Some will materialize sooner than others.”

 

There is a shadow of doubt on Strange’s face that Tony doesn’t miss.

 

“And if they don’t?”

 

Strange holds his gaze, the sincerity of it more than Tony can bear. “The gauntlet brings back people who were alive at the time of Thanos’s reckoning.”

 

“Peter was alive.”

 

Strange doesn’t shake his head, but he cuts it to the side. “He was wounded. Just before we were pulled out of existence.”

 

 _I don’t feel so good_.

 

“No. He was standing right there, right next to us — ”

 

“He’d been hit in the crossfire. Vitally, some few minutes before. The adrenaline sustained him.”

 

Tony is shaking his head. “He was standing _right there_.”

 

_I don’t know what’s happening …_

 

Everybody else just vanished. But Peter lingered. Peter stumbled and fell.

 

Because Peter was _hurt_ , and Tony was too distracted to notice.

 

“Tell me. Tell me if he comes back or not. I know you know, just _tell_ me.”

 

Strange closes his eyes. “I wish I could. It all depends on him.”

 

“Depends on _what?_ ”

 

“His will to come back.”

 

Tony is so furious at this sentiment that it is a miracle he doesn’t plant a fist into the other man’s face right then and there. This isn’t about _wills_. If it were, he has no doubt in his mind that Peter would be here right now. That he’d be getting an alert from the Iron Spider suit letting him know that both it and Peter were back online. Peter was a whole lot of things, but above all, he was a kid who wanted to _live_.

 

He opens his mouth and turns back to Strange to say something else, but he’s already gone.

 

* * *

 

It only takes May an hour to call him. For a few moments he just waits on the other end of the line; he’s hoping that she’s calling to say that Peter is with her. He can tell from the way her breath hitches that she’s hoping for the same thing.

 

“He was on that planet with you, he wouldn’t — there’s no chance he ended up there, is there?”

 

Tony considered this. Hoped for it, even, as terrified as the kid would be. But they’ve since heard from the Guardians that returned, and there was no sign of Peter on Titan, either.

 

May lets him go before she starts to cry. Tony straightens up and faces the billions of people who want answers that only he and his surviving teammates can give.

 

* * *

 

It’s not real and it is. Peter’s not coming back. But a week goes by and Tony finds himself still waiting, waiting, waiting — clinging to news reports of the rare person still materializing, or wild stories about people who materialized on boats in the middle of oceans and took days to find. Peter won’t be one of them, but he has to be. He _has_ to be.

 

So Tony does not sleep.  

 

He stays in the tower, because it’s practical, but more to the point, because it’s closer to Queens. He finds himself there more often than he should. Finds himself there often enough that, four weeks after the final battle, he is face to face with a classmate of Peter’s, waiting at a bus stop not too far from Midtown High.

 

He stops and stares, noticing her well before she notices him. Her gaze is cutting when she meets his, but then she recognizes him and it immediately dampens. The mutual understanding is so immediate and puncturing that Tony wants to walk away from it as soon as it’s there.

 

She takes a step forward, surrendering her place in line. Her eyes are urgent.

 

“He was there.”

 

Tony knows what she means, but he has to be sure. So he waits for her to elaborate.

 

“In the nothing place,” she says. “Peter was _there_. I felt him. I — ” Her eyes are still hard, but watering. “I waited as long as I could. I didn’t want to leave without him. But the current, or whatever it was, it pulled me back.”

 

Tony feels like he is dreaming this. Even so, he feels like it’s his responsibility to stifle whatever this is in her — the hope. It’s crushed him too many times and suddenly he doesn’t want it crushing her, too.

 

“Nobody can remember what happened to them. You probably just dreamed that.”

 

She shakes her head, adamant. “I _felt_ him.”

 

Tony blows out a breath, because he doesn’t want to ask the question heavy in the air between them: _Then why isn’t he here?_

 

“He’s going to make it back.”

 

In the end Tony doesn’t stifle her hope, but fans it like a flame. He reaches into his coat pocket, grabs his phone, and airdrops her his contact information. She feels her phone humming in her own pocket, registering what he’s done and what it means. If either of them hear from him, they’ll let the other know.

 

A few moments pass before she says anything, and then: “God, I’m going to use this to prank call you so often after he’s back.”

 

For the first time in months, Tony almost smiles.

 

* * *

 

May refuses to have a funeral. When she tells Tony this she says it with the tone of someone who is ready to fight, someone who is looking for one. But Tony grits his teeth and says, “Good.”

 

She stares at him, stunned.

 

Tony can’t give up on him yet.

 

* * *

 

But a month turns into two, turns into three, turns into four. It’s a bitter winter, an unfamiliar one. People are still shell shocked, trying to pick up pieces they didn’t know could be left behind.

 

Tony starts drinking again. He dreams about the battles, dreams about his teammates. Dreams about being stabbed, and crushed, and hurled into space. Dreams about everything, it seems, except for Peter, like it is the one stubborn place his unconscious mind refuses to go.

 

Maybe because it’s all he thinks about when he’s awake. That startled, helpless look on Peter’s face. The fear in his eyes. And then the resignation —  _I’m sorry._

 

The one night he does dream about it he wakes up yelling, wakes up to Pepper shaking him and trying to soothe him, but he is past that, senseless with guilt, with regret, with something he doesn’t want to name but knows the shape of in his chest all too well: _grief_.

 

“I thought I could save him,” Tony says, some indeterminable time later when he finally is in control of himself.

 

Pepper pulls him into her embrace, runs a hand through his hair. “I know, Tony. I know.”

 

* * *

 

“I dreamed about him last night.”

 

Tony is barely awake. It’s a miracle he was even asleep at all. He hasn’t managed it in weeks.

 

“About Parker?”

 

It’s the girl. The classmate. Michelle. He doesn’t remember the name because she told him, but because some sliver of a conversation has come back to him, something Peter rambled about in one of those three minute long voicemails he used to leave for Happy. Weird things like that come and go, welcome and unwelcome, crossing Tony’s mind when he least expects it.

 

“Yeah. I just wondered if …”

 

Tony buries his face into his hands. “I haven’t heard anything.”

 

“Right.”

 

There’s a pause.

 

“I’m sorry. I don’t know why I called.”

 

Tony isn’t sure why she did either. “What happened in the dream?” he finds himself asking, even though it’s absurd, even though this conversation shouldn’t even be happening.

 

Her voice doesn’t waver. “He came home.”

 

* * *

 

It’s Rhodey who sets his foot down, not two hours after Tony ends that call.

 

“We didn’t save the world,” he tells Tony, snapping him out of his self-sacrificial stupor. “We just held it together. It still needs saving.”

 

When people returned, some of them returned badly. In the incorrect places. With displaced memories. Most of them sorted themselves out within a few days, but some not before they were taken advantage of — Tony has Pepper leading the charge on putting an end to the trafficking that went unnoticed in the beginning of the chaos, so it’s not as though they’ve turned a blind eye. They have drones sweeping vulnerable areas, facial recognition technology uniting people with their families every day.

 

Or at least it was every day — the lost are fewer and fewer. Tony knows better than to hope one of them is Peter. But he also knows better than to think he can hole himself up forever, when people still need his help.

 

And so he lets Rhodey pull him out into a mission. Rhodey keeps it simple. Close to New York, because Tony has still refused to leave the city. Tony engages the Iron Man suit and for a moment he can’t breathe —  _I don’t know what’s happening —_ and he closes his eyes, remembering too much and not enough, the panic swelling in him like a tumor.

 

He forces himself to find steady ground. To move.

 

The kid wouldn’t have cowered like this. He would have helped. It’s the least Tony can do, if he has to be the one who survived.

 

They’re halfway upstate when Tony gets a ping from FRIDAY, and his display is all at once interrupted with an alert that he is certain he is hallucinating. Certain, that is, until Rhodey stops dead in the sky, because he’s gotten it too.

 

“Tony,” he says warningly.

 

But Tony’s already locking coordinates.

 

“ _Tony_.”

 

His suit outpaces Rhodey’s, but never more so than it does right now. It takes Tony less than ten minutes to reach the coordinates in a little town in Connecticut, in a little sidewalk that bleeds into a trail; takes him another thirty seconds to follow that trail and find a boy in a gray hoodie and ridiculous striped socks, limping up the path.

 

Tony lands a few yards behind him, disengages the suit. The boy doesn’t turn around.

 

“Peter?”

 

He stops. Turns, so slowly that Tony thinks that at any moment he’ll wake up from this. And there, impossibly, is Peter Parker, alive and blinking at him behind bright eyes.

 

“Jesus.” Tony half-walks, half-stumbles over to him; his arms are extended like he doesn’t know what to do with them, pat the kid on the back or grab him or _shake_ him. “You’re alive.”

 

Peter takes a step back. His eyes aren’t quite fearful, but they’re wary. Now that Tony is close enough to him, he can see the thin sheen of sweat on his forehead, the way his breath is coming too fast.  

 

“Kid … ”

 

“I — I’m sorry,” Peter says. His voice is raw, like he hasn’t spoken for days. “Do I know you?”


	2. Chapter 2

“Kid.”

 

Peter flinches, his eyes latching onto Tony’s. A flicker of something — recognition, maybe. But it’s gone faster than it comes.

 

“Peter.”

 

“I’m sorry,” says Peter again, searching Tony’s face the way you search a stranger’s. “I’ve got to get home.”

 

Tony opens his mouth —  _Damn skippy you do_ , he almost says, wanting to fall back into old rhythms, into the beats between him and the kid he remembers how to follow. But Peter turns up the path and continues his slow, limping march without turning back.

 

Tony takes a few cautious steps forward. The kid looks like he’s going to drop at any second, every step more unsteady than the one that came before it.

 

“Rhodey,” he murmurs into his comm, “we need medical.”

 

“On it.”

 

Tony follows Peter, catching up to him too quickly. Peter’s pace is slowing but nothing in his stance seeming to indicate that he’s even aware; it’s like there is some invisible force between him and something Tony can’t see, urging him onward, pulling him to it. Tony settles for treading just close enough behind that he’ll be able to catch Peter when he goes down.

 

“Why don’t we just … take a breather?” Tony asks.

 

Peter doesn’t stop, but he cuts a glance at Tony. His face is considerably paler than it was even moments ago.

 

“Are you — are we expecting you?” Peter asks. He’s breathless, bloodless, but he doesn’t seem to notice. His face is all passive politeness, as if Tony has intruded on some kind of routine.  

 

“Who is we, kid?”

 

Peter’s brow knits. “My parents.”

 

Tony’s mouth unhinges. Peter has already turned away from him before he even sees, and Tony follows his eyes up the path, which has widened without him realizing — widened to a tiny little white house with a porch swing, with unmowed grass and weeds and plants growing wild, with flecked paint and parts of the roof peeling.

 

Peter stops. “What …”

 

An alert reaches the monitor on Tony’s glasses. He assumes it’s Rhodey, but it isn’t — it’s the house itself. It’s been tagged by SHIELD. Or at least some distant version of SHIELD, nearly a decade ago, whose files are all too easy for FRIDAY to access. The prompt on his display tells him the house once belonged to Richard and Mary Parker.

 

“Something’s wrong.” The words come out of Peter in a too thin breath.

 

Tony speed reads the file, his eyes snagging on words that clench in his stomach — the house is condemned. Condemned enough there was once round the clock security outside of it, before this whole Thanos thing blew everything to shit. The site of sensitive experimentation either stolen or gone wrong, files buried so deep that even FRIDAY can’t access them, but Tony doesn’t need to access any of it to know what is written all over Peter’s face: this was his childhood home.  

 

Peter turns and looks at Tony, actually _looks_ at him, and it’s too close to the face he made just before he crumbled under Tony’s grasp. Only this time he doesn’t fade. This time when he goes down, he goes down _hard_ , and so fast that Tony barely reacts in time to stop him from tumbling to the ground.

 

“Take it easy, kid. I’ve got you.”

 

There’s a trickle of blood running down Peter’s mouth that is becoming decidedly less like a trickle by the second. It’s as if he really has been suspended for all these months, the injuries from the battle as fresh as they were on Titan.

 

But Peter is oblivious to it, blinking at the abandoned house even on his knees, even with the full weight of him in Tony’s arms.

 

“Something’s _wrong_ ,” Peter insists.

 

Tony blows out a breath through his teeth. “Yeah. But we’re gonna fix it.”

 

“Where is everyone?” Peter asks. “Did I … have I been away?”

 

Tony hesitates, but only for a moment.

 

“Here’s what’s going to happen. We’re gonna sit here for a sec, because help is coming. And then we’re going back to the tower, and everything will be — ”

 

Peter’s whole body shudders, his eyes rolling into the back of his head. The _fine_ dies on Tony’s lips like the lie that it is.

 

He lays Peter down on the ground, holding his shoulders. “ _Rhodey_ , get me an ETA.”

 

“One minute out.”

 

Peter goes slack, his wheezing breaths suddenly too quiet, all of the resistance leaving his body like it was blown right out of him. Tony presses a hand to the kid's chest, another to his face, trying to stir him back.

 

He's not losing him again. He’s _won't_.

 

“Kid.” He’s lost the composure he’s always promising himself he’ll keep. “ _Peter_.”

 

He hears a chopper in the distance. Medical is on its way. They can fix him, they have to _fix him,_ but Tony already knows bone deep that whatever this is he might not have the power to fix.

 

Peter’s eyelids flutter. Tony doesn’t know if he can hear him, but he says the words anyway, low and close to Peter’s ear: “I know you’ve never listened to me a damn day in your life, but stay with me, kid. That’s an order.”

 

* * *

 

Four hours later, Peter is unconscious but stable, a small, pale body swallowed by IVs and white sheets — four hours later, and Tony understands that Peter’s _I don’t feel so good_ may have been the understatement of the century.

 

Severe concussion, crushed ribs, the kind of internal bleeding that made even Helen Cho blanch. Tony was kicked out of the operating room, but not far enough away that he didn’t hear the barked orders, or the intermittent wail of the flatline. It’s the nightmare all over again, or really the nightmare that never really stopped — the kid is dying, the kid is dead, and there is nothing Tony can do but watch.

 

There is one thing Tony knows for certain, now that he is sitting here alone by kid’s bedside. Thanos snapping his fingers may have erased Peter, but it turned out to be a small mercy. Left on Titan with these injuries, he almost certainly would be dead.

 

There’s a knock at the door then. Tony wonders if Pepper called May — he sure didn’t. But whoever it is doesn’t wait for Tony to answer to walk in, which should have been the tip off that it could only be one Stephen Strange.

 

“You took your time.”

 

Strange doesn’t respond to his barb, only sits in the armchair next to his and settles his attention on Peter.

 

“Well? Are you going to explain what the hell is wrong with him, or did you just come down here for some good old-fashioned awkward silence?”

 

This time Strange rolls his eyes, and Tony feels that perverse satisfaction followed by a vague regret that he always does after getting under someone’s skin. It doesn’t last long, though. Strange’s eyes settle back back on Peter, an unreadable expression on his face.

 

“There are infinite realities beyond ours — the past, the present, the future of all of them happening at the same time.”

 

“Oh, good, a crash course in string theory.”

 

Strange ignores him. “The place where Peter and the others went — it’s the only space in the universe beyond those realities. A vacuum.”

 

 _The nothing place_ , the girl called it.

 

“Some are more acutely aware of it than others. Peter, unsurprisingly, was among them. So when Peter was released from it, it appears he may have … nudged one of the other realities.”

 

Tony opens his mouth to make another smart remark, but the breath deflates in his chest before he can manage it.

 

“One where you die, and his parents live.”

 

Tony’s body is so still that he can hear his own heartbeat in his ears. After a moment he turns to Strange, seeing the answer in the other man’s eyes before he even speaks the words: “You’re talking like those two things are connected.”  

 

Strange’s face is grim, but honest as ever. “They are.”

 

Tony buries his face in his hands. Tries to collect himself. _How?_ he wants to ask, the word already threatening to tear in his throat, but he doesn’t need to know. He is responsible, somehow, and nothing Strange says is going to change that.

 

He pushes down the wave of self-hatred like swallowing his own bile, and focuses on the one thing he is good at. “How do we … how do we fix it?”

 

“We don’t.”

 

Tony turns to him sharply. “Then what the hell are you good for?”

 

Strange holds his gaze, refusing to stoop to his level. There’s something too close to empathy in it, and Tony is the one who has to look away.

 

“To explain. The memories from the other reality will fade. In a few hours, a few days — he probably won’t remember any of it. Not even what he said to you.”

 

For the first time since Strange walked in, Tony feels something akin to relief. “You could have opened with that.”

 

Strange stands abruptly, and puts a hand on Tony’s shoulder. “Take care of yourself.” Which is to say: _You got what you wanted. Try not to fuck it up._

 

* * *

 

Only after Peter is definitively out of the woods and Strange has given him some answers does Tony call May. She is a half hour away from the tower when Peter stirs and, without warning, immediately sits up in bed, blinking that wide awake, panic kind of blink that a kid does when they think they’re late for school.

 

Then the panic gives way to actual panic, and Peter’s eyes fly across the room, meeting Tony’s so abruptly that it feels like a crack in the air.

 

“Shit,” says Peter. He squeezes his eyes shut.

 

Tony takes a step toward him. “I’ll go grab a nurse — ”

 

“ _No_ ,” says Peter, through his teeth. He blinks, and says in a voice that Tony actually recognizes, “No. I’m — I feel fine.”

 

But his eyes are pooling with tears.

 

“No offense, kid, but you don’t look it.”

 

Peter won’t meet his gaze again. He blinks the tears back and almost succeeds. One of them leaks out, streaking down his cheek, hitting the bed sheets.

 

Tony reaches out to put a hand on Peter’s shoulder, but Peter flinches away before Tony can even get close. It is impossible not to feel the hurt of it — it’s been months, _months_ , an unfathomable amount of time spent aching and hoping and hating himself. He just — it’s stupid. He just wants to hug the kid, or even just put that hand on his shoulder, needs some confirmation more than his own eyes that he’s here and he’s _real_ and the world isn’t going to swallow him up again.

 

“They’re gone," Peter murmurs. "They’re gone in this world, aren’t they?”

 

Tony wishes he could pretend he doesn’t know what Peter’s talking about, so he doesn’t have to be the one to let him down.

 

“I’m sorry, Pete.”

 

Peter shakes his head, just once. It’s sharp and unlike him, twisting his lips into a scowl, furrowing into his brow.

 

“I can’t … I can’t … remember what’s real and what isn’t.”

 

Tony levels with him. “It’s going to be like that for a bit. And then it’ll go away.”

 

“I’m forgetting them. That’s crazy. I can — I can _feel_ them going away,” says Peter. The tears are bare and unabashed now, but angrier than Tony ever anticipated. Peter swipes at them with the heel of his hand, his eyes charged. “My parents. My brother. They’re — I can’t — _no_.”

 

Tony opens his mouth to say something, anything —  _It’s okay_. But it’s not. _You’re happy in this reality_. But how well does he even know that? He tries again — _You’ve got your aunt here. You’ve got me._

 

What kid wouldn’t trade that for their parents in a heartbeat? For a _brother?_

 

“I’m sorry,” says Peter. He lifts his hands for a moment like he might be reaching out for Tony, but they freeze mid-gesture, and he pulls them back into himself where they stiffen into fists. He is clearly at odds: the Peter who remembers, and the Peter who doesn’t. The Peter who needs Tony, and the Peter who needs things that Tony can’t give. “I’m _sorry_ , I just — ”

 

“Don’t be sorry. There’s nothing to be sorry about.”

 

Peter takes a shuddering, wet breath. “Can you please go?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things to address: 
> 
> 1\. I am a liar. This is going to be three parts. (Whoops!) 
> 
> 2\. YOU GUYS. I've been in tears reading your reviews. I feel like I've been on an island in the last few months because writing by yourself, rewarding as it is, is kind of like screaming into a void, but writing fan fiction in a time and a place with so many other people who FEEL YOUR SAME FEELS just. WOW. Guys. I feel like I got to come back home after a very long spell away. Thank you for reading, and for your extremely kind and generous comments, and thank you more than anything for your understanding and patience. I wish I could be on here all day frolicking in my feelings with you guys. (AND WILL BE, just as soon as this manuscript is dealt with.) HOW LUCKY ARE WE ALL THAT THERE IS THIS WEBSITE FOR US TO ALL MUTUALLY FREAK OUT TOGETHER??? What a time to be alive. 
> 
> 3\. For those of you wondering, I write as a day job AND as a (as of yet unpublished, but still with very real and terrifying deadlines) fiction writer, to explain why I sleep for like five hours a night (and less when I'm back on my fanfic-ing bullshit LIKE I SO LOVE TO BE). It is a great life. It is a sleepless one. Being on here with you guys is 500% the best part of it. 
> 
> 4\. My shady tumblr side blog is upcamethesun, if you are a tumblr person. I mostly just reblog irondad content and cry. 
> 
> 5\. Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry (about this chapter's last line). SORRY!!!! (sry.)


	3. Chapter 3

Strange is right. By the time May reaches the tower, Peter appears to have forgotten everything.

 

Tony stands outside the door, where he’s been pacing ever since Peter asked him to go. The kid is bleary but bright-eyed and so full of questions — _What happened to the Guardians? Is everyone okay? Do I have to repeat senior year?_ — that for him, Titan was seconds ago, a blink of an eye.

 

And then the inevitable question comes: “Where’s Mr. Stark?”

 

Tony hovers by the door. It’s a cue if there ever were one, and he’s a master at this — swallowing his own hurt, thickening it with bravado and bluntness and the not-so-humble brags. He’ll sweep in like he always does, say something meaningful but gruff, and immediately soften it with some quip at the kid’s expense, and everything will fall back into place.

 

Only there is no ground for it to fall back on anymore.

 

Tony starts walking away before May can answer. Takes off five minutes later to rejoin Rhodey’s mission. Leaves a voicemail for the kid, welcoming him back to the land of the living. Tries not to think of the look on his face just before he left the hospital room as it cracked right down the middle and he wept for a family he’d never remember, for the life that he didn’t get to keep.

 

* * *

 

_“Hey, Mr. Stark. Saw some sick Iron Man graffiti in the Bronx, the new suit and everything, I would have taken a pic but — well — criminals and stuff, had to run. Oh! That’s why I’m calling. I ran into Rhodey! I told him to tell you I said hi, but just in case he didn’t — well, anyway. Small world, huh?”_

 

* * *

 

 _“Saw you on the news last night talking about that universal translator chip, and I have an idea for it that might be totally lame but might be_ super _cool, anyway, if you have a sec I could drop by the lab maybe? I’m almost caught up with all the school I missed so I’ll have time, if — well — anyway, let me know.”_

 

* * *

 

 _“Hey Mr. Stark, the craziest thing happened! Quill sent me a message! From_ space! _Did you know raccoons in space can_ talk?”

 

* * *

 

_“Hey it’s me, I got into MIT! I applied before the whole ... anyway. I mean I don’t know if I’m going, I heard it’s full of nerds, hah, just kidding, Mr. Stark. Anyway I gotta go tell Aunt May. Hope everything’s chill with you guys.”_

 

* * *

 

_“Hey, it’s, uh — it’s Peter. I was — I mean, I know you’re busy, I just wanted to … Anyway. It’s kind of been awhile? And … well — maybe I’ll catch you later.”_

 

* * *

 

Two months pass without Tony seeing the kid.

 

That’s not strictly true — he sees the kid every day. When he was fifteen and first starting out, Tony synced the suit to let him know when Peter is in and out of it; after a year or so he unsynced it it, trusting Peter would call for backup when he needed it, or that the system would override him if he hadn’t. But as soon as the kid starts patrolling again — a mere _day_ after getting released from the medbay, so help him, God — Tony turns back on the old protocol, and gets the same ping every afternoon when Peter dons the suit, and the same ping that follows sometime after midnight when he finally peels himself out of it.

 

He gets more than the pings — he gets Peter’s voicemails. Gets news alerts whenever Spider-Man does something vaguely impressive or highly embarrassing and goes viral. Gets flags from the AI in the kid’s suit about his heart rate or his body temperature whenever they’re out of the normal range.

 

He gets one such alert in a cold day in February, but it disappears just as fast as it comes. Tony pulls up the suit’s display and sees the heart rate spike and oxygen levels rise and taps into the live feed.

 

Skyline, somewhere high above midtown Manhattan. Peter hasn’t quite kept to the neighborhood lately.

 

“Shit. _Shit_.”

 

The eyes of the mask tilt down and go dark; Peter’s hands are over his eyes.

 

“Is everything alright, Peter?” the AI in his suit prompts him.

 

It takes Peter a moment to answer. “It’s not real.”

 

“What isn’t real?”

 

Peter lets in a sharp intake of breath.

 

“Should I contact someone?”

 

“ _No_. Jesus, Karen, no.” His vitals slowly return to normal. “What was I … what was I saying?”

 

“That something wasn’t real.”

 

“What wasn’t?”

 

“You didn’t elaborate.”

 

The skyline comes back into focus again as Peter lifts his head up, takes his hands off of the eyes of the mask.

 

“This is the fourth time you’ve said that to me this month. Would you like for me to replay the log?”

 

A beat. “No. No, don’t.”

 

His breathing is ragged.

 

“Karen — if I say that again — just — don’t tell me, okay?” Peter asks. “I don’t want to know.”

 

* * *

 

_“Hey, Mr. Stark … is everything okay? I haven’t — I mean, you haven’t been in the news or anything for awhile, and I — I haven’t heard from you, so. I just — wanted to make sure everything’s good.”_

 

* * *

 

One day in March, a portal opens up just as Tony is pulling into the compound.

 

“Does anyone ever text anymore?” Tony mutters, but his heart is already seizing in his chest before he even pulls himself out of the car.

 

Strange is scowling, the hole in the continuum still open and radiating behind him; this visit will clearly be a brief one. This time, at least, he’s probably not here to announce the end of the world.

 

“You need to get ahold of your kid.”

 

“Excuse me?”

 

“Another near miss like that, and he’s a goner. It was pure chance I was even there at all — ”

 

“There for _what?_ ”

 

“Falling from a goddamn helicopter in the middle of the Hudson River,” Strange huffs.

 

Tony balks at him. At some point in the conversation he must have stepped back; he's leaning against the car door, his chest tight. “There’s a parachute in his suit.”

 

“Evidently,” says Strange, his scowl burning a hole into Tony’s eyes, “he is not using it.”

 

“He’s _what?_ ”

 

“And here I thought the great Tony Stark knew everything,” says Strange. “Your kid has been wearing his own tech for weeks.”

 

For once, Tony is too stunned to find words. He opens his mouth to say that can’t be true — he’s been getting pinged twice a day when the kid dons the suit and goes home for the night — forgetting, for half a second, that it’s not a kid, but a genius IQ-level kid with a penchant for getting himself into trouble.

 

Tony looks back at Strange, to offer some kind of begrudging comment adjacent to a thank you. But Strange doesn’t want it.

 

“Peter chose. Whether he remembers it or not, he made a decision, and he chose to come back. To this world. To this reality.”

 

Strange’s words are simple but his tone is accusatory. Tony cuts his gaze down at the pavement, waiting for some kind of relief from them, but all he can hear hammering between his ears is _What if he chose wrong?_  

 

When he looks back up again, Strange is gone.

 

* * *

 

“What the _hell_ , kid?”

 

For a moment Peter doesn’t answer. And then, flatly: “How did you get this number?”

 

“How did _you_ come to the conclusion that suicide by DIY was a banner idea?” Tony shoots right back, before the hurt can fully stick. “You too good for Stark tech now or do you just have some kind of death wish?”

 

He’s so angry that it feels like there isn’t a single muscle in his body that isn’t tense with it, so angry that he is staring out the window of the compound and the world outside of it seems to tilt with his rage.

 

“Honestly, kid, there are enough headlines about you flirting with death to open a goddamn fish market. Helicopter-diving, taking on a group of enhanced without backup, some bullshit about nearly getting split in half by a portal — what the hell are you thinking?”

 

Peter’s voice is so dull on the other end of the line that it doesn’t even sound like him. “Are you finished? Because I’m in the middle of a patrol.”

 

“Hey. I’m _talking_ to you — ”

 

“And it only took you _four months_ ,” Peter bites out. “Turns out you _do_ know how to return a phone call.”

 

Tony knows he fucked up, but doesn’t fully understand the depth of just how much until this moment. Until this moment when he hears the pain in the kid’s voice, but more importantly, hears the shape of it — a year ago Peter might have stammered, let out a few wet accusations and cried. But this Peter is cold, grounded rage, and it scares the hell out of Tony in a way that feels uncomfortably close to startling at his own reflection in a mirror.

 

“I know it’s been — ”

 

“Yeah, you know what? I don’t really want to hear it,” says Peter.

 

“Too bad, because — ”

 

Peter hangs up.

 

“ _Shit_.”

 

* * *

 

Tony waits a day to cool off before he resigns himself to finding the kid. He locks himself in his lab, trying to find something to say to the kid the same way he tries to find flaws in his tech to repair; the trouble is, it's all woven and knotted too tightly in him for him to peel it apart. The shame of letting Peter down. The guilt of knowing that in some way, whether it is inconsequential or everything, he played a role in Peter losing his parents. And the constant, pulsing fear that something will happen to Peter again, the way things always seem to do when Tony is around. 

 

There's no time to untangle it. Not if Peter insists on treating his life like a rubber band he can snap back into place. 

 

But when he reaches out to him, Peter’s gone. So far gone that he doesn’t come up any cell phone ping or camera feed that FRIDAY has swept in the entire 50 mile radius of Queens.

 

“He … does this sometimes now,” says May, when Tony gets ahold of her. “But he always comes back.”

 

“He _does this?_ ” Tony repeats, at a loss.

 

May lets out a weary sigh. “He’s eighteen now. I can’t … I can’t stop him.” A beat. “Sometimes it feels like he’s still just so far from me. I don’t want to do anything to push him further away.”

 

She doesn’t ask for his help. Doesn’t ask if he knows where Peter might be. It’s worse than if she had come right out and yelled at him for the way he’s faded out of Peter’s life; she doesn’t even think it’s worth trying to get him back into it.

 

“Let me …”

 

“Tony,” she says, warningly.

 

He closes his eyes. “I might know where he is.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I AM A LYING LIAR!!!!!!!!!! There will be one more chapter after this. I was trying to cram it all into one, but it just didn't flow as nicely and I think it'll hit home harder to break it up. (But I am an internet goblin, so what do I know?) 
> 
> Thank you guys so much again for your patience and your support. Most of the last chapter is finished, so hopefully I'll get a chance to post it soon — still ironing things out with my big ole scary deadline (PARTY HARD), but this makes the terror, like, 93% less potent. So bless all of you for that. 
> 
> If anyone needs me, I'll be openly weeping and using a cupcake as a tissue to dry my tears because I'm dealing with that whole thing where the Russo brothers said Aunt May survived the snap like the CALM, REASONABLE HUMAN THAT I AM!!!!


	4. Chapter 4

In the mouth of a narrow dirt path that leads to a worn little house in Connecticut stands one Peter Parker, leaning against a tree, a tattered notebook rolled into his palm. He doesn’t turn when Tony lands and disengages the suit. Not even when Tony walks over to him, reminded too sharply of the moments he found Peter here months ago, wide-eyed and lost and bleeding out. 

 

He’s expecting Peter to persist in ignoring him, but the kid’s on the offensive now. He turns so sharply to look at Tony that he finds himself unprepared for it — for the gauntness of the kid’s face, the bruise-like circles under his eyes, the way he is looking at Tony with an almost rehearsed kind of rage because even after all this he doesn’t seem to have it in him to be fully mad, the way he deserves to be. 

 

He waits for Tony to say something, and when he doesn’t, he lets out a bitter laugh that’s more of a scoff and turns his eyes back to the little house. 

 

“What are you doing here, Pete?” 

 

Peter seems to mull over whether he’s going to respond or not. His curiosity must win out, because in the end he says, “You already know.”

 

It’s less of a statement and more of a question, Tony understands. But Peter seems unwilling to ask him anything. As if even one question would be allowing himself to budge, to give Tony more room in his life than Peter can let himself give.

 

So Tony answers the question Peter won’t ask. “I found you here. It’s where you materialized, after you came back.” 

 

Something in Peter’s face starts to give, like a wind blew through it. “I don’t remember that.” 

 

“No, I don’t think you would.” 

 

They don’t say anything for a few moments. Tony searches Peter’s face, for some part of it he recognizes. Peter has always had somewhat of a lost look about him, the look of someone who’s been at the world’s whims more often than the world has followed his, but he’s never looked like this — like he has grated himself down to his bones. 

 

Strange was wrong, then. Peter didn’t fully forget. 

 

Tony’s eyes skim the beat-up notebook in Peter’s fist. Peter unclenches it, letting it unfurl. Tony nearly holds his breath as Peter slowly opens it, and shows Tony the inside. 

 

It’s the address of the house. Over and over again, in different inks, with different degrees of rushed handwriting. Peter turns the page again — the address, three more times. His thumb snags on the next page and he shuts the notebook abruptly, but not before Tony sees that he’s written someone’s name. 

 

_ They’re gone in this world, aren’t they? _

 

Tony tries to blink it out of his eyes — the name on the paper, the look on Peter’s face that day. “Kid …”

 

“I keep — I keep writing this address. And other stuff, too. But mostly — I just write it, and I don’t remember doing it.” His eyes are focused on the house with an intensity that betrays him; Tony can still sense the depth of Peter’s hurt even with the new tricks he’s apparently learned in the months he’s been away. “It’s like I’m leaving myself instructions, or something.” 

 

Tony forces himself not to blow out the breath he is holding, not to give himself away. But Peter evidently knows Tony too well not to see past a lie, too. 

 

“That day — I said something to you, didn’t I?” Peter asks. 

 

“A few things, yeah.” 

 

“Whatever it was really pissed you off.” 

 

Tony shakes his head abruptly. “It wasn’t — it’s not like that.” 

 

“Then what’s it like?” Peter asks. 

 

He turns his back to Tony before he can answer, walking a few paces away from the house and then stopping abruptly like there is a coil snapping back, holding him in place. He looks back at the house in some mixture of anguish and fury, like it is a real, breathing thing that has Peter held in its fist. 

 

“It scared me,” Tony admits. “It was — it was like losing you again.” 

 

Peter is too momentarily stricken by the bareness of the words to respond. He stands there gingerly, like he is waiting for Tony to say something to buffer it, to make the words less honest than they are and take some of the weight of it away. 

 

When Tony doesn’t, Peter’s eyes flit back down to the notebook. 

 

“I think he wants me to go inside.”  

 

“So why don’t you?” 

 

Tony cocks his head toward the door. Peter hesitates, the question still in his eyes even if he is too stubborn to ask it out loud. Tony nods, and only then does Peter move forward, Tony falling into step behind him. 

 

The front door isn’t even locked. Peter opens it, and it swings open with a whine that cracks through the early morning air, but Peter seems to expect it — the feel of the knob is his hand, the weight of the door, the noise that it makes. Tony follows him into the front hallway, feeling like he is in the aftershocks of someone else’s earthquake. The pictures of Peter and his parents on the wall. Pairs of shoes still haphazardly lined up at the door: loafers, slippers, a little pair of light up Skechers. A whiteboard with a meticulously color-coded calendar, set to March, with days scribbled in for  _ Peter allergist 2:30!! _ and  _ Dinner with Holmes family.  _ A shrine, untouched by time if not by SHIELD, as if its occupants were blinked out of existence. 

 

Tony’s eyes hit the floor, his throat tight — it happens like this sometimes. He’ll be walking around, thinking his thoughts, and they will be drowned out by the one that haunts him most:  _ I don’t want to go.  _

 

“They never let me come back.” Peter’s voice stirs him back to the present, to the musty house and its creaking floorboards and its uninvited guests. “After my parents — after they died. May and Ben picked me up from CPS, and …” He bites down for a moment before he goes on, almost as if he’s not talking to Tony at all. “It was just a normal day, and I never came back.”

 

He’s walking away before Tony can react, through the living room still riddled with old Disney and Power Ranger DVDs, past an office with a slew of diplomas on the wall, into the kitchen with its sunny yellow appliances all covered in dust. The fridge looks like a scrapbook threw up on it — photos of a smaller Peter slathered in sunscreen at the beach, an invitation to someone’s wedding, a postcard from May and Ben from Florida. A child’s drawing of reds and yellows and blues — a crude Iron Man and Captain America, scribbled in crayon. 

 

Tony tears his gaze away from it, but it’s already adding weight to his chest. 

 

“In the other reality, I’m not Spider-Man.” 

 

Peter’s words are thick; he’s staring at the notebook, where he must have written things down. 

 

“Is that why you think you came back?” 

 

It’s a pointless question, when they both already know its answer. 

 

But Peter shakes his head. There is something in his expression so startlingly, familiarly earnest when Peter looks back up at him that Tony’s afraid to move, afraid he’ll puncture it before it even has a chance to breathe. 

 

“Maybe,” he says. “But I think mostly because — because of May. And Ned, and MJ, and …” 

 

For a moment he doesn’t think Peter will say it. Whatever it is they’ve got going on, it is rooted in awkward beats, in pointed silences — moments he wants to acknowledge what they mean to each other, that Peter has quietly accepted Tony will never quite be able to give. 

 

Peter’s the one who breaks it. He’s always been the braver one. 

 

“And you.” 

 

Tony should feel anything other than the fear that seems to stab at him two places at once: the sharp, immediate fear that he won’t know what to do or say, and this will be one of a string of moments, big and small, he has let Peter down. And the other, more of an ache, a burden that only grows with every day that has passed since Thanos: the fear that he won’t be able to acknowledge any of this without daring the universe to take Peter away again. 

 

“And — and the other reality makes it along without Spider-Man,” says Peter, to the floor. “It’s not that different.” 

 

Tony’s eyes snap up in surprise, and then, suddenly, there is too much of the Peter he knows than Tony is bargaining for — this kid who is somehow both uncertain and hopeful, both terrified and determined, both crumbling into pieces and stronger than Tony will ever be. 

 

There is no room for Tony’s fear here, not anymore. Not if the kid is going to go around thinking shit like  _that_. 

 

So Tony leans in, claps the kid on the back and uses it to pull him in. At first Peter is too stunned to move, but Tony holds him there for a beat, following an instinct he usually does his best to ignore — and then the kid wraps his arms around him so readily and so uninhibitedly that it cinches something in Tony’s chest. 

 

He says it now, and says it fast, because it needs to be spoken and he knows the universe will be finished giving him chances after this: “You’re wrong. It is different without Spider-Man. But _especially_ without Peter Parker.” 

 

This shudder goes through Peter’s body, the swallowed beginning of a sob. 

 

“I tore up the galaxy to get you back, kid. And I’d do it all over again.” 

 

There’s a beat where Peter seems to stop breathing, and then he nods into his shoulder. Tony’s own eyes start to burn, and he pulls the kid in a little tighter, and finally —  _ finally _ — some of the edges of the nightmare start to recede. 

 

He doesn’t pull away until Peter does, the kid’s eyes red-rimmed but pooling with relief. He swipes at his eyes, blinking at Tony. 

 

He should tell the kid he’s sorry. Explain what happened, and how, and why. But the fist that Peter’s clenching around the rolled notebook finally loosens, and so does some of the tension in his shoulders, the wariness in his face. Peter is not a kid who needs an apology or an explanation. He’s a kid who needs Tony to be there for him, and a kid who needs to be allowed to let go — both in this reality and the next. 

 

Peter rests the notebook on the counter. His eyes are still on it as he takes a step back, grazing it and then looking back up at Tony. 

 

Tony nods, just once. There is an understanding, then: they will leave this place, but the notebook will not.

 

Tony knows from too much experience that they will hardly leave all of their demons behind. That the things that haunt them both will always be there, lurking in their own expected and unexpected ways. There is no way to outrun them, maybe, but there is this — the fragile kind of hope. The unspoken promises. The weight of this shared understanding between them that Tony is never certain how to define, except in the knowledge that it matters more to him than anything else. 

 

“C’mon, kid,” he says, putting a hand on Peter’s shoulder. “Let’s go home.” 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I'm officially not lying anymore — this is the last chapter of this fic. I will hopefully be back sometime in mid-June (pray 4 me). Thank you all for giving me a place to funnel all of my #feelings and for sharing all of yours ... the Russo Brothers may have low key murdered us all, but at least we went down together, amirite?

**Author's Note:**

> Guys. Guys. GUYS. I swore I wasn't going to write fic. I am on a soul-crushingly, ridiculous, monumental deadline for an entire manuscript, and will not be free from it until mid-June, at which point I will likely unleash all unholy HELL of post-Infinity War fics. But I had to get this out of my system, even if it meant not sleeping this entire week to make sure I stay on deadline with the manuscript (I'm literally NaNoWriMo-ing for two straight months; kill me. KILL ME.) 
> 
> All this is to say: I was basically in tears that some of you reached out to me asking if I was going to write anything, because my professional writing life is still A Mess (TM) and knowing that internet strangers are reading my dumb words makes me happy beyond words. This will have one more chapter, and that'll be it from me for the time being, but I promise to return as soon as I humanly can. Thank you all for reading and for your support <3.


End file.
